View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0007273 | Valley 1 | Gameplay Idea | Apr 27, 2012 9:46 am | Apr 27, 2012 11:34 am | |
| Reporter | Bluddy | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Product Version | 1.001 | ||||
| Summary | 0007273: Removing Upgrade Stones | ||||
| Description | From the forum: I think LintMan made an excellent point (that making upgrades hard is counterproductive because it increases the grind penalty from dying, and ultimately upgrade stones are a difficult mechanic to balance). I've been thinking about this, and maybe the whole mechanic of the upgrade stones has to go. I mean, it's not so natural anyway. There's already a mechanism to upgrade your character in the form of the enchants. So why have a mechanism that upgrades your health, creating balancing issues, and can be lost so easily with death causing grind? Here's my idea: the current upgrades from upgrade stones will be rolled into types of enchants. Enchant variety is always good. These enchants won't be as strong as upgrades can get. So what do you lose with death? How do you make death painful without necessarily making it a grind? You lose the enchants that you carried. You see, the enchants would be similar to spells -- they're stored in the settlement in a personal cache, and to equip other enchants you have to go back to your settlement. I think this alone is a really good idea. Why? Because it allows customized characters. Right now, say you're fighting something in a cave and there's acid water that you could fall into. What do you do? You simply put on your acid gills. There's no threat from the water. Every character possesses so many enchants that are readily available, that there's no customization of the character. And customization is important -- very much so. To make a procedural game meaningful, you need random situations involving different environmental factors that affect differently customized characters differently. The best example of this I know is Binding of Isaac (which I consider brilliant). You encounter different enemies in different zelda-like arenas, and every game and battle is different because your character has picked up different powerups and is therefore differently customized. It works brilliantly. But in AVWW, every character eventually becomes an amorphous blob that has a hundred enchants and can therefore adjust to any challenge. If the enchants were stored at the settlement, this would mean that every time you head out you have to think about what you're doing and how you're going to equip yourself. More important, this would mean that you have to consider the possibility that you'll die and lose those enchants forever. The beauty of this idea is that enchants that you lose are not a massive loss, because you collect so many of them. Initially you may be more stingy for example and only use one enchant at a time, not wanting to lose your whole cache in one go. Later on you have so many that it doesn't matter that you lose some, but you'll mix your best ones with less important ones and this is exactly what we want -- we want you to not be super duper strong all the time. Your consideration of possible death will make you reconsider which enchants to take, and I think this is very good. But the important thing is that we're not causing grind by death. We're only causing possible grind if you ran out of enchants and you want some, or if you weren't careful and took all the best enchants. Now there's a question -- if upgrade stones are gone, what is there to find in stashes? The answer is enchants. Perhaps even some super enchants, or health boosting enchants. Perhaps there's even an enchant that preserves another enchant through one death cycle. Enchant containers will give you a minimal percentage to slowly get another enchant, but the real way to get enchants is through stashes. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
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I'm definitely opposed to this -- it takes away the ability of players to customize their characters directly, and it removes the only meaningful penalty for death. Switching it so that enchants are lost would be vastly more challenging. The mechanic is solid and can be balanced, we're just not there yet. I feel it at the tip of my brain, though; the thing to emphasize here with this is player choice rather than penalty, so I think that the entire nature of the cost structure for the upgrade stones just needs to be changed quite a bit. |
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OK. Maybe monsters can randomly drop one upgrade stone? Prevent stones from seeding individually in random building hallways, so you can get either a large cache of them in a stash, or you can kill some monsters instead. This gives you 2 avenues for getting upgrade stones which makes that mechanic less grindy vis a vis death, and also gives a reward for killing monsters, thus killing 2 birds with one stone! (so to speak). |
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The upgrade stone system is different from other games. On one hand it penalizes you for dying, but on the other hand if you had the foresight to save a few stones in case of death, you're back in the fight as strong as ever. It takes 232 upgrade stones to max a character with 4/3/3 stat distribution. By my estimates and under normal gameplay, it takes about two hours to accrue that many. In other words, if you die less than once every two hours you can keep a maxed out character without running out of upgrade stones. Took me about 5-6 deaths to get used to the system, after that I stopped dying. Now I have 1000 stones and don't know what to do with them. |
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I think you'll like what we have planned in the next version, Bluddy. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 27, 2012 9:46 am | Bluddy | New Issue | |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:49 am | tigersfan | Internal Weight | => Feature Suggestion |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:49 am | tigersfan | Status | new => considering |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:50 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | Feature Suggestion => New |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:50 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022828 | |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:50 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | considering => closed |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:50 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Apr 27, 2012 9:50 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| Apr 27, 2012 10:04 am | Bluddy | Note Added: 0022831 | |
| Apr 27, 2012 10:31 am | Quaix | Note Added: 0022832 | |
| Apr 27, 2012 11:34 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0022839 | |
| Apr 14, 2014 9:30 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Category | Suggestion - Gameplay => Gameplay Idea |
